A culture fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.
Interpretation
This quote critiques society's obsession with female thinness as a means of controlling women's behavior, rather than a genuine appreciation for beauty.
Naomi Wolf argues that the societal fixation on female thinness serves as a mechanism to enforce obedience among women, implying that dieting is a tool used to keep women subdued and compliant. This quote suggests that the pressure for women to conform to unrealistic beauty standards is not just about aesthetics but is deeply rooted in the politics of control and power dynamics, where a distracted and self-critical population is easier to manage.
In practice
In a discussion about body image during a women's rights seminar.
Looking back on 200 years of feminist agitation in this country, we've got to get it that the moral high ground doesn't get us anything. Pleading with powerful men never gets us what we need. Talking doesn't do it. Being right doesn't do it. Hardball politics does it ... and a political strategy.
The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon them.
The woman wins who calls herself beautiful, and challenges the world to change to fit her vision.
The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.
Our society does reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside. Women must not be blamed for choosing short-term beauty "fixes" that harm our long-term health, since our life spans are inverted under the beauty myth, and there is no great social or economic incentive for women to live a long time.
Peaceful, lawful protest - if it is effective - IS innately disruptive of “business as usual.” That is WHY it is effective.
Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?
A man is sorry to be honest for nothing.
I'm opposed to a lot of the time that we as a civilization have come to spend looking at screens. For my money, life is much delicious damn near everyplace but inside that screen.
There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, 'That person I see is a savage monster;' instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.
I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naivety has no peer but my own.
Sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge… There are two ways to be your own Savior and Lord. One is by breaking all the moral laws and setting your own course, and one is by keeping all the moral laws and being very, very good.
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